Gettysburg

When the South seceded, many Southerners thought the North was not in earnest and would not fight. Almost as soon as the North showed it would fight, some Southerners began to slip into the elegaic melancholy of the Lost Cause. Others believed that though the odds were long against them, the Confederates could still win the war if they fought with enough brilliance and daring. The leading spirits of these aggressive optimists were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Both generals believed that the side with the fewest men must take the longest chances, and that only boldness could keep the Union armies at bay. For two years their methods worked, and they drove back every assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond.

But though the Union could not advance in Virginia, none of Lee's and Jackson's victories seemed to bring the war any closer to the end. Their most brilliant victory, at Chancellorsville in May, 1863, is still taught in military academies but drove the Northerners back only five miles, and the loss of Stonewall Jackson might have mattered more than any battle. Meanwhile the Union was slowly conquering the Confederate west. Searching for some way to win the war, rather than just prolong it, Lee decided on an invasion of the north. A great victory on Union soil, along with the seizure of Philadelphia or Washington, might, he reasoned, have an effect on northern morale that none of his Virginia victories had. So he led his men into Pennsylvania, the Union troops followed, and the two armies blundered into each other at Gettysburg.

For two days, the fighting went well for the Confederates. They drove the Union forces back, breaking their lines several times. But by 1863 there were so many experienced officers and veteran regiments on both sides that there were no easy victories. Every time their position was threatened, Union officers did what was necessary to repair the damage, acting without waiting for orders. Every Confederate thrust was countered, every breakthrough contained. Every act of Confederate gallantry was matched by one from Union men. Both sides suffered frightful casualties, but at the end of two days the Union army remained unbeaten, still in a strong position. And while the Confederate army shrank with every passing hour, steadily arriving reinforcements swelled the Union force. On the night of that second day, Union commander George Meade called a council of war. His top commanders agreed unanimously that they should remain where they were and receive the attack that Lee was certain to launch the next day. Much is made of the way Lee anticipated the moves of his opponents, but after two years of fighting many Union officers knew Lee as well as he knew them. Meade even guessed where the assault would fall, warning John Gibbon that he would be attacked in the morning. Lee, Meade guessed, would use the same design as Marlborough at Blenheim and Napoleon at Marengo; after wearing down his enemy with repeated assaults on their flanks, he would try to break their center with a great charge.

Lee's top subordinate, Longstreet, pleaded with him not to order an attack Longstreet thought was doomed. Lee would not listen. He had not brought his army to Pennsylvania to take it meekly back home. He needed to win a dramatic victory, and he knew he would not win one without taking great risks. So he arrayed the 12,000 men he had available and, after a great artillery bombardment, sent them forward across a mile of open land to the center of the Union line. Seeing them come, Union artillerymen cheered and brought their guns to bear. The Union infantry waiting behind stone walls on Cemetery Ridge loaded their muskets and waited. Some were awestruck by the grand attack, but the more experienced men knew they were being handed a chance to get their revenge for many past defeats. As the Confederates came near, they took aim and fired. Along most of the wall the fire was so intense that the Confederates never got within 50 yards. In one spot called The Angle the men of Picket's Division reached the wall and broke though, and for a few minutes they held their ground at the crest of the ridge, until Union reinforcements arrived and drove them back. A few of them wrote later that they could see masses of stragglers along the road behind the Union front line and knew that with a few more men they could have broken through and won the day. But they were mistaken. The men on the Taneytown Road were not stragglers, but a reserve of 13,000 men and 40 guns that Meade had assembled to seal any break in the line. Meade had so many men that he could defend all his lines and still keep in reserve a force bigger than Lee could muster to attack him. The Confederates retreated to their lines, leaving more than a thousand dead men on the field and another three thousand as prisoners in Union hands.

Gettysburg was not a decisive battle. Lee took his army back to Virginia, Meade followed, and they spent the rest of 1863 in pretty much the same positions they had occupied when the year began. What Gettysburg did was to show, to anyone who still believed otherwise, that Southern brilliance and daring would not be enough to win the war. The Union had found ways of countering Lee and his officers. The war, Gettysburg confirmed, would be won by the weight of men and money. That meant that it was only a matter of time before the Southern armies were crushed, leaving the Confederates to either surrender or head for the hills and fight on as guerrillas.

Oh, yes, I have a little archaeological project at Gettysburg now, which is why I was there today. The top picture shows the view down the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, the second shows Little Round Top from the view of its Confederate attackers, third is the view from the Union line across the field of Picket's Charge, and the last picture shows a red-tailed hawk sitting on a sculpted eagle in the Wheat Field.